How do authoritarians and totalitarians usually gain power? One of the tried-and-true methods is to foment social chaos. It happened in the Bolshevik revolution. It happened in Adolf Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. It happened in Mao’s “cultural revolution.” It’s important to understand – and this is hard for most of us – that crime and mayhem and lawlessness are actual goals of transformational socialists. Chicago is ablaze with violence. More people are killed there than in all of Afghanistan where the U.S. still has thousands of soldiers deployed. Keep in mind, Chicago is run by Democratic socialists lock, stock and barrel. It has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, yet is rapidly becoming the murder capital of the U.S. Most shootings of innocents are never even prosecuted. It’s a test case for gun control. If gun control is designed to reduce gun violence, Chicago is living proof it doesn’t work. In fact, it is living proof that it has exactly the opposite effect – escalating gun violence. It’s as simple as the old cliché: “When guns are criminalized, only criminals have guns.” It’s also as simple as the title of John Lott’s sensational statistical study, “More Guns, Less Crime.” There are nice people who believe it – take it at face value that banning guns will reduce gun violence and crime. They see it as counterintuitive to believe otherwise. But it’s actually common sense. Now I don’t think Barack Obama and those actively working pushing for gun bans are stupid, and I don’t think they are nice people. I think they are evil. I think they are immoral. I think they are anti-American and anti-Constitution. And I think they know exactly what they are doing because they are transformational socialists. So how and why does social chaos lead to tyranny? It’s simple. You can see it at work in America today. Chicago and other urban centers are more violent today than when Al Capone was running the show. What’s the answer from the gun-grabbers? They blame neighboring suburban towns for selling guns – even those neighboring suburban towns have no crime problem. Besides grabbing guns from everyone in the country, they suggest the Department of Homeland Security and other federal police agencies step in to control the situation. Isn’t that just what one would expect from a transformational socialist – the development of a police state? By the way, social chaos isn’t just caused by gun violence induced by taking guns out of the hands of honest citizens. It’s caused in a thousand other ways – like teaching moral relativism in schools, like sowing the seeds of moral confusion in the broader culture, like actively breaking down the institution of marriage, like abrogating parental rights, like dividing up the population into special-interest constituencies, like encouraging a victimhood mentality among those groups and so on. They open the border up wide and blur the distinction between citizens and illegal aliens – also contributing to violence, mayhem, joblessness, economic dislocation and cultural non-cohesiveness. There’s more, but you get the idea. Gun violence is not really the problem for the transformational socialist. It’s the solution. And that’s why the Department of Homeland Security is imposing what I call de facto gun control, by buying up automatic weapons it deprives ordinary citizens and purchasing massive amounts of ammunition so there will be less resistance when putsch comes to shove. That’s when the “civilian national security force” comes marching in. Are these the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic conspiracy nut? No, this is simple deduction. One plus one equals two. Is it hopeless, irreversible? I wouldn’t be writing this column if I thought it was. But it’s way past time for Americans to awaken from their slumber, turn off the boob tube, pull their kids out of the government indoctrination camps called “public schools” and start taking stock of all we have to lose – our national heritage of our God-given liberty, constitutionally limited government, personal responsibility, self-government and the self-sacrifices our forefathers made to make America what it once was, a shining city on a hill.